Making Parents

Whilst ‘Parenting Culture’ and ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies’ are now well established subfields of sociological scholarship, so far, the common threads between these two bodies of work have not been significantly explored. Taking ‘reproduction’ as the locus of this comparison, this project, run by CPCS Associates Charlotte Faircloth (UCL) and Zeynep Gurtin (Cambridge) aims to bring together novel contributions from scholars working in either field who are interested in creating such connections. In particular, we are interested in exploring the ways contemporary cultures of parenthood create an appetite for these technologies, just as technologies simultaneously contribute to shaping those very cultures

As part of the project, we have run three events, a panel at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Denver (November 2015), a conference held at the University of Roehampton in conjunction with the BSA Human Reproduction and Families and Relationships Study Groups (December 2015) and a panel at the BSA Annual Conference in Manchester (April 2017).